At the end of last year I wrote about the upcoming, as-yet unseen season four of Community with a kind of mournful hope (here). The mystifying firing of creator, showrunner, and guiding auteur Dan Harmon was looming large over the production, and fractious behind the scenes conflict with the notoriously irascible Chevy Chase had put the production under a cloud. However, while things seemed irredeemably grim, the series had developed a tradition of repeatedly proving itself capable of exceeding dire expectations time and again.

It was a show that lived under the perpetual shadow of cancellation and reduced budgets, but each week fought on bravely, continuing to tackle daunting narrative conceits that have bewildered multimillion-dollar films. It had, after all, managed to repeatedly legitimise seemingly impossible shifts in theme and genre and tone: from jumps into clay animation, to exploring alternate dimensions through the delivery of a pizza; from making a pitch-perfect Ken Burns documentary around an intractable pillow-fort conflict, to building the gravity of a Law and Order murder case around a sabotaged yam. A tenacious, ingenious mockingbird, Community had masterfully weathered countless storms, continuing to offer television’s most consistently rewarding and rich examination of a group of beautifully broken characters who realised they needed each other to survive.

And so, having now watched season four (in which new showrunners David Guarascio and Moses Port faced the program’s most daunting prospect: continuing on without the voice that has defined and guided every moment of its brief span) I’d like to look back upon this final, truncated season and explore how these episodes fit into the larger structure of a show that I have spent the last few years dearly, deeply, and almost irrationally, loving.

And sadly, the most revealing way to start is by flashing forward to the end…

A dream.

We ended on a dream. With the prospect of the show never returning for a season five, the show decided to end on an episode that took place primarily in the confines of dream, localised in the mind of the central protagonist.

Wow.

Frequently considered one of the laziest, most undercooked scriptwriting conventions in television, ‘It was all a dream…’ has become a cliché for hackneyed narrative twists. From the writers of Dallas retroactively abolishing a year’s worth of sticky narrative, to MacGyver travelling to King Arthur’s court, to Rosanne throwing the whole reality of her show under the metatextual bus for a trite farewell, while there are, of course, exceptions*, too often ‘It was all a dream…’ exists as a rote means of granting writers free license to indulge their fancies with the logistical and consequential conventions of narrative abandoned. Romances can suddenly blossom between characters without the sacrifice of their sexual chemistry back in the ‘real’ world; central players can die while being free to over-emote again once the dreamer awakes; irrational tales can be played out with no need to clean up the resulting mess; the dream episode asks its viewers to detach themselves from their investment in the logic of the fiction, and to follow the writer on an excursion into the inconsequential vagaries of ‘What if…’

Which in this instance, given the significance of the day and episode in question – central protagonist Jeff Winger’s graduation from the community college around which the show is centred, and the potential finale of the series – is asking rather a lot. This is the last time that these characters will be depicted relating to each other on an interpersonal level, and we are asked to spend that time lost in the transom of fantasy.

Even more unfortunately, Community’s finale not only relied heavily upon the whimsy of its absurd premise – alternate versions of the Greendale gang are imagined crossing over into the real world to prevent Jeff from abandoning his original dickish, self-involvement – it is also designed to be a half hour of uninterrupted pandering fan-service, with every second line operating as obscure call-back to gags and subplots and asides from the first three years of the show. From Abed’s obsession with The Cape, to the fake-Dean, to the Starburns memorial, to paintball, to the words ‘Six Seasons and a Movie’ scrawled on a background blackboard. The show was so busy recalling all that it was, literally losing itself down a fantasy of recollection, that it forgot to ground itself in the interactions of these characters – the glue that has defined the show from the beginning.

In the first episode of this last season, ‘History 101’, the writers made a big point of how the show was going to ‘change’. It was the primary thesis of the episode, and voiced to be the guiding principle of the season – a mission statement that literally declared the show was going to grow and evolve in new and exciting ways. Abed even leaned into the show’s fourth wall until the supports groaned and gave a speech about it:

‘I was trying to hang on to this moment because I was so afraid of the future. Then I realised: all of this was once the future. And it was completely different from all I’d known before. And it was all happening so fast. But in the end – or in the now, I guess – it turned out great.’

The show promised – both to characters and audience – that even though the past was great, even though the show would necessarily be different without Dan Harmon at the helm, good things can come from change, and emotionally, ideologically and textually, the show had to move on to new great things and find its own fresh groove.

And yet how did they use the season to build up this promise of a new bold vision for the show? By spending every episode referencing what once was: the darkest timeline; the air conditioner school; a Dr. Spacetime convention; the Dean’s wardrobe obsessions… on and on and on.

And seemingly every time they tried to expand upon the fertile but unexplored ground Harmon left tilled they underplayed the possibilities there, too… We met Jeff’s dad – in a plot that felt like a B-story afterthought. We had Britta and Troy get together – and proceeded to forget about their relationship for the whole season, until it was expedient to try and milk the breakup as a profound, emotional trial. We actually remembered that Pierce now has a half-brother with whom he might cultivate a newfound familial relationship – and had him appear for only ten seconds one time, never to be spoken of again. And we’ll still have Leonard. And ‘Pop-Pop’ Magnitude. And Other Annie. And Fat Neil. They won’t do much, or contribute anything. But they’ll be there because… well, whatever. Why not, right?

Indeed, looking back on this season, the only new, ongoing concept I can point to that these episodes contributed to the canon was ‘Changnesia’, a concept and execution that has made me long to erase the whole character of Chang from the show. …That’s right. They turned me against the sublime lunacy of Ken Jeong because the way his arc was handled was riddled with inconsistency and wasted potential. Beyond immediately blowing the reveal that he was faking his memory loss the whole time, truly: where did his entire storyline go? His scheme to help the villainous Dean of City College just cut off midway through, no mention at all of how it apparently resolved, or where it was supposed to be going.

Perhaps the only real highlight of the season was the episode penned by Jim Rash (Dean Pelton), ‘Basic Human Anatomy’, a riff on Freaky Friday, in which Abed and Troy pretended to switch bodies so that Troy could avoid the uncomfortable duty of telling Britta that their relationship was over. On the plus side (unlike every other episode this season) Community superficially sounded like itself again – the characters (with the rather unnerving exception of Britta) felt reinvigorated, and had dialogue that snapped and crackled with energy; there was a lovely absurdism rumbling away in the background of Greendale once more (the Dean channelling Jeff’s personality; the conclave of murder-mystery janitors; even the return of the anti-Die Hard waiter (damn that guy!); and there was a depth and intelligence in the spine of this script.

Having Jeff and Britta tandem unlocking the code of Troy and Abed’s regressive fantasy, talking to one character while actually tapping into the fears of the other – was admirably ingenious, and went a long way to justifying the leap asked of the premise. Jeff’s final advice to Troy – that trying and failing is still an act of bravery – was a welcome nod to the emotional gravitas that this show once made look so effortless. It was an episode the was worthy to stand beside those written under the guidance of Harmon (and I can offer no higher praise, given the context).

However, this welcome return to a more polished script and dialogue could not disguise the extreme logical and thematic jumps that the narrative asked of its characters and audience in order to try and achieve its intended emotional denouement. Trying to manufacture strain in a peripheral romance Z-plot (even to the point of bending space-time: they were dating for a year?), and leaving Britta to be resignedly cypher-dumped by Abed were jumps that completely disrupted the suspension of disbelief, and rather undermined her character.

Rash’s script did try to paper over this rift in Britta’s behaviour by having her firstly, numb with surprise, and secondly, coming to understand that she had ‘always’ been aware that what drew her to Troy – his innocence and immaturity – was what would ultimately doom their relationship (and to her immense credit I feel Gillian Jacobs tried to sell it that way in her delivery). But ultimately this is meeting the show way more than half way, because the framework for such a realisation was not established at all, merely regurgitated in a glut of exposition. Simply put: the rest of the season didn’t support this premise enough for it to work. It was a lively, imaginative script, but the story it tried to tell had not been nurtured, or really even established enough by the season-running plot to land as it should.

Ultimately, though, the episode that I found really weirdly irked me the most was the penultimate episode, ‘Heroic Origins’. Effectively ‘part one’ of the season finale’s ‘Greatest-Hits’-remember-when-athon, the audience was invited to explore how each of the characters unknowingly influenced one anothers’ lives before they had even met, once again using this as a thin pretext to call-back on all the gags that couldn’t be crammed into the finale…

Remember Troy’s keg-flip? Remember how Annie freaked out and ran through a glass door? Remember how the Dean once said ‘I hope this doesn’t awaken something in me…’ Yes? You remember it all clearly and don’t need to be reminded in such a shameless way? Well too bad, because here you get to see it all. Even to the inanity of discovering where Magnitude got his catchphrase, or where Annie’s Boobs the monkey originally came from.

The episode was, as it declared itself to be, an ‘Origins’ story, an excuse to flash back on everyone in the year before they decided to come to Greendale – comical dental-gear, letter jackets, Obama t-shirts and all. And wouldn’t you know it, the story reveals that each of these characters all unknowingly influenced each others’ existence in profound, life-altering ways: Jeff’s life choices impacted upon Britta; Shirley was an influence on Abed; Annie made a difference to Troy; Pierce was… apparently already being written out of the show. Round and round in a neat ouroboros.

Indeed, the episode eventually declares that their friendship was inevitable, that they were all bound together by some unknowable causal web, an interdependence from which they could not disentangle themselves, even if they tried…

Except you know what? To hell with that.

To hell with suggesting that these seven misfits were always bound to be thrust together no matter what – that they have no free will, and that the universe knew what was best for them, bringing them together no matter how hard they fought against it.

For its first three years of life, the most precious, spectacular thing about Community (for me, anyway) was the revelation that no, these people did not, and do not, have to be friends. Nothing is forcing them. The universe isn’t holding a gun to their heads. At any moment, any one of them could get up from that table, walk out the door, and never come back. Indeed, that premise – that realisation that what they have is transitory; that it needs to be cherished and protected – has been the driving force of a good number of episodes in which it truly did seem that the group might implode: that Pierce was leaving; that Jeff had screwed them all over; that Abed might just be too alien to be accepted…

And what was always most important about that concept, what was reiterated again and again in every narrative that mattered, was that their friendship was based upon a choice: a profound, beautiful, messy, and scary choice.

They agree to try.

They choose to fight for something impossible and special; to believe that there is something worthwhile in struggling to remain friends, even in spite of all their disparate life experiences, even in the face of all their internal squabbles, their fears of exposure and rejection. They agree to do the difficult, complicated thing, and keep coming back to that table; to keep sitting down in that shared space and allowing themselves to be open with each other.

To become a community.

…But no. ‘Too bad; it was fate’ works too, right? Really captures the poetry of it all.

And now, after fighting so impossibly long to stay on the air, it’s over. (Probably.) And we got a season that by any other program’s standard would be solid, but by this one’s heritage was anodyne. There was one standout episode (I would have loved to see a Rash script in an earlier season), but the rest of the season, despite spruiking change, regressed into trading on nostalgia with nothing new to say.

So, instead of celebrating what was most unique and central to the show, the showrunners this year chose to overload the episodes with rehashed reminiscence. We sure were great once, they seem to be saying. Remember that joke we said that one time? Remember how we laughed? But in spending all that time looking in the rear view mirror they forgot where and why they were driving the car in the first place.

How such a majestic, quirky, loveable show could be turned into something so conventional (not bad, I should add, just bland), has, as this rant no doubt makes clear, made me quite sad. Despite the exceptional work of its extraordinary actors (with the possible exception of Chase, who really did seem to be phoning it in this year) and the devotion of its talented staff, I guess ultimately I will have to accept that, for me at least, Community ended in season three.

While there were moments that fleetingly reignited the spark of its greatness, by abandoning its most precious truth for a needless self-referential illusion, this final season revealed itself to be just well-produced fan-fiction that has perhaps overstayed its welcome; the metatexual fever dream of a dying series watching its own life flash before its eyes.

IMAGE: Community (Sony/NBC)

* As a random aside, I would gladly offer Batman The Animated Series’ ‘Over the Edge’, and Angel’s ‘Awakening’ as fine examples of how one can use a dream to great effect.

Much can and has been said about the impending, miraculous return of a little show called Arrested Development – the fourth season of which is currently being filmed and is scheduled to be screened on Netflix later this year.* Admittedly the majority of what I would offer to such a discussion consists of me descending almost immediately into gleeful, froth bag hysterics, or winding up into a rage at the idiocy of the show’s premature cancellation – but that fact notwithstanding, much can be said. For those unfamiliar with the series, however, those perhaps looking on in curiosity as fans like myself squee with joy at every detail dribbling out of the production of the new episodes, it is probably quite difficult to comprehend how a failed sitcom could overcome such a protracted hiatus to make its Lazarus return (six years is an eternity in television, with every one of the principle actors moving on to new projects) – and even more, why at this point anyone should care this much that they have.

It is a simple truth that it is always difficult to summarise humour. Explaining why something it funny usually results in dreary treatises of clinical description that utterly strangles any possibility of joy from comedy. Nonetheless, when discussing a great sitcom, one often speaks of the moments that capture some truth about the series, a moment that can be seen to lift the show from hilarious to sublime. Perhaps the first paintball episode in Community where Chang enters in a John Woo blaze; maybe the moment of unspoken forfeit when Kramer slaps down his losings on the kitchen counter in Seinfeld’s ‘The Contest’; possibly meeting Dr. ‘Space Man’ in 30 Rock’s ‘Tracy Does Conan’; or having David Duchovny go all Basic Instinct on Larry in The Larry Sanders Show episode ‘Everybody Loves Larry’. In each of these instances, what is depicted on screen is so funny, and so perfectly encapsulates the sensibility of the larger text on so many different levels, that the show becomes immortalised as one of the defining works of narrative humour, and frequently they spring to mind when trying to explain that program’s charm.

For Arrested Development the show’s mercurial narrative overflows with such comparable beats, offering flashes of orchestral comic genius that leap out from the screen: GOB theatrically crying, ‘Return from whence you came!’ before hurling a dead dove into the ocean, for example; watching Charlize Theron ‘magically’ walk on water, only to have Tobias, on fire, unable to sink in that pool moments later; the family trying to run a fundraiser to combat the scourge of the disease ‘TBA’ (literally: ‘To Be Announced’); the many lessons one can learn through pranking with a one armed man; Buster’s run-in with a ‘loose seal’; watching the nation scramble to war at the threat of WMDs, only to ultimately deflate the conflict with Henry Winkler delivering the finest line-reading of his career: ‘Those are balls…’**

But personally, when I look back at the span of this series, the moment that cemented the show into a work of comedic transcendence, that symbolises everything that this anarchically imaginative narrative can accomplish, occurs in the third to last episode of season two, ‘Meat the Veals’. Here, at last (how did the show ever function without him?) we are introduced to another son of this eccentric family: a little man they call Franklin.

Mr. F.

But first: some history to help put this show’s miraculous return into context, and to justify its unique capacity to bring the dead to life…

As those already familiar with Arrested Development and its first three tumultuous years on air can attest, Arrested is the panacea of hope for every beloved televisual narrative that has been snuffed out before its time. For every Firefly unjustly ripped from the air; for every Deadwood that never got to play out its final beats; for every Law and Order that was smothered in its infancy (onlytwenty years?! Are you crazy NBC?!), there are precious few Futuramas and Star Treks brought back from oblivion. But Arrested Development – thank the almighty television gods – has now proved, against all odds, to be one.

In its original run (2003-6) it mystified the executives at Fox who seemingly looked on in abject horror as this award-winning, critical darling, with a rabid (if small) fan-base, underperformed in the ratings. For three seasons it skimmed along the edge of cancellation, each season’s order of episodes getting scaled back, from 22, to 18, to 13… to 0, with Fox itself eventually giving up trying to promote it completely, waiting over a month after it bothered screening the program regularly to callously dump the final four episodes in a glut all on one final night: Feb 10th, 2006, directly up against the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics.

Throughout this battle to stay alive, however, Arrested retained its acidic wit, even masterfully integrating the issues of the show’s gradual downscaling and flagging ratings into the subject matter of the narrative: the truncation of the studio’s episode order was referenced in the series two episode ‘Sword of Destiny’ when Michael is seen arguing on the phone with a client who has suddenly decided to reduce the amount of housing they had ordered the company to ‘build’ from 22 to 18 (‘You initially told us to design and build 22 homes, now you’re saying 18 – that doesn’t give us enough capital to complete the job anymore. We’ve already got the blueprints drawn up and everything’); and in that same episode, the idea of moving the company to a new floor in the building is also raised – an idea perhaps referencing the show’s proposed timeslot change (moving them to a new floor in the building that ‘costs less’).

More overtly still, the brilliantly titled ‘Save Our Bluths’ (or: ‘S.O.B.s’) – an episode that had the family scrambling to save their business with a fundraiser awareness campaign – sarcastically contained every conceivable television grab-for-ratings staple possible: gratuitous celebrity guest-stars (Andy Richter played himself and his four identical brothers); extraneous 3D effects (put on your glasses now so that Gob can throw a tomato at you for no reason); a hyped-up, ultimately arbitrary ‘Which of these beloved characters will die?’ mystery (spoiler alert: it was the perfunctory extra who had only enough lines to establish herself as an unsympathetic racist); and contained several reminders of the narrative’s new primary mission statement, which sounded (as they almost certainly reallywere) like studio notes on the script: characters were repeatedly reminded that they had to appear more sympathetic, and have identifiable problems that could be easily resolved through a series of frivolous, ultimately heart-warming escapades. The episode even began with the masterfully earnest Ron Howard, narrator of the series, breaking the fourth wall by reminding viewers to ‘Please, tell your friends about this show…’***

Ironically, however, for a program that exhibited this kind of acute, snarky, meta-textual self-awareness, much of the comedy within the narrative stemmed from the characters remaining blissfully, hysterically unaware of their own foibles and failings. From oldest son GOB’s (George Oscar Bluth’s) cocktail of inferiority complexes that manifest themselves in overcompensatory pageantry (a stage magician with a penchant for travelling via Segue and wearing ‘Seven thousand dollar suits – Come on!‘), to youngest son Buster’s sheltered, indulged life (a man in his thirties who still wants to wear matching sailor outfits with his mother, and whose dating history stretches little further than his mother’s best frenemy and a torrid affair with his Roomba). From daughter Lindsay’s need to overcome her self-esteem issues through protesting and activism – no matter how ill-advised or contradictory (in one episode she advocated both for and against circumcision, in another for her brother’s right to ‘die’ via fake-coma), to granddaughter Maeby, a fifteen year old rebelling against her mother’s rebellion by landing a job as an enormously influential movie producer responsible for multimillion dollar budgets (her adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea, The Young Man and the Beach, surely lost nothing of the original’s pathos…)

Even central protagonist Michael, a figure who in any traditional comedy would play the straight man amidst this menagerie, is in fact a figure so distracted by his longing to be a ‘good guy’, to appear selfless and benevolent, that he is blind to his own selfishness and false sense of superiority. …And all of this is before one even touches on a character like Tobias Funke (never-nude, graft-versus-host sufferer, cross-dressing British housekeeper, ‘analrapist’, who repeatedly prematurely blue himself).

On every level this is a show concerned with its characters’ incapacity to see the truths of themselves, revelling in their escapades a peculiar subverted narcissism that borders on the demented. What truly set the show apart, however, was its capacity to revel in the fantasies of these characters to borderline delusional extremes. And it is at this point, in one of the series’ most absurd imaginative allowances, that Franklin appears.

GOB, it is revealed, created Franklin Delano Bluth in an effort to liven up his magic act with some light ventriloquist banter. He was a puppet, loosely ‘inspired’ by the somewhat controversial Sesame Street character Roosevelt Franklin. But unlike his muppet namesake, who it has been argued skirted the edge of racial sensitivity, Franklin Bluth blindly stampedes right over it. And so, moments after his ‘birth’, Franklin is offering GOB’s mother some ‘brown sugar’ and laying down some truths ‘whitey’ apparently wasn’t ready to hear. (…Although, as GOB admits, ‘African American-y’ wasn’t ready to hear them either.) Soon enough, GOB and Franklin are recording duets about being both ‘brothers’ and ‘not heavy’ (Franklin with his own microphone and headphones), and crooning witless, self-penned lyrics like:

It ain’t easy being white…

It ain’t easy being brown…

All this pressure to be bright.

I got kids all over town…

Like a surreal homunculus, Franklin immediately embraced his gift of life and began seemingly acting independent of his creator. Indeed, by the third season Franklin is so assertive that he is instrumental in helping solve a court case, and undertakes a bold new business venture that puts another (this time literal) feather in his cap…

To the outsider it might seem ludicrous that a puppet could be so imbued with life, or that anyone could fail to delineate between themselves and the inanimate object strapped to their wrist, but one of the defining attributes of GOB is that he is so starved for a kind of egomaniacal gravitas that he fully invests in this skewed anthropomorphism. What is even more extraordinary, however, is that everyone else invests in the reality of him too.

People talk to Franklin. They speak about him when he’s not there. George Sr., offended by a crack that Franklin has make about his wife, Lucille, reacts by strangling the puppet – not the incompetent ventriloquist who artlessly mouthed the comment. When Buster puts him on, Franklin lets out a swift tirade at matriarch Lucille, shouting: ‘I don’t want no part of your tight-assed country club, you freak bitch!’ – an outburst that takes Buster himself by surprise. Even Michael, the character most disinclined to encourage GOB’s flights of fantasy, periodically acknowledges the puppet’s individuality. While trying to get off the phone with GOB, he gives in to this bisection of personality (despite the fact that at this moment the character is literally nothing more than a voice on the line), saying: ‘No, I don’t want to talk to… Heyyyyy, Franklin.’

Franklin becomes symbolic of all the illusory excesses at work in this family’s dynamic, every impossible longing that they project upon the world, that obscures their reality: Tobias’ acting career; GOB’s desperation to be the new David Copperfield; Lucille’s life of entitlement and excess (her stomach cannot ‘handle’ curly fries). Franklin presents for them an imaginative focal point, a communal delusional indulgence in which they can all hubristically embolden their own fantasies.

But the moment in which all of this coalesces into the perfect nonsensical epiphany comes when GOB, desperate to please his escaped convict father, agrees to sneak him past a condo security guard in the back of a limousine. When the guard wanders closer to inspect the cabin and offers a friendly greeting, GOB offers a nervous hello, one that is followed immediately by Franklin leaping up and shouting, ‘I ain’t your daddy!! Hey, brother!!”

The guard – who is African American – looks down at what appears to be an offensive racial stereotype perched on the blithely ignorant rich Caucasian man’s hand. He tells GOB to pop the trunk and roll the windows down. For a moment everything stops a beat.

In the front of the limo, the nervous GOB fidgets desperately, and the camera zooms in on his face.

In the back of the limo, the fugitive George Sr. looks terrified, and the camera zooms in.

Throughout the entirety of the series, Arrested Development knowingly cultivated a mild cinéma vérité aesthetic. Ron Howard narrates the interactions of this family in a sincere, detached tone, as though describing the behaviour of snow leopards or water buffalo; boom microphones swing into view; editors insert footage and clippings that reveal salient information (the cutaway to Tobias’ ‘Analrapist’ business card remains a haunting warning against abbreviating occupational specialties). Despite being pushed further into the background of the viewer’s attention than in a show like The Office or Parks and Recreation (where people talk directly to camera), Arrested frequently used this documentary presentation to inform and propel the narrative, sometimes to speed up the exposition, sometimes for a swift gag; but here, in this one fantastical lens shift, this style reveals something far more.

Not only had the characters invested in the ‘reality’ of Franklin – ballooning out from GOB and his duo enterprises (duets; double-acts), through the family at large (‘Heyyyyy, Franklin…‘), to the wider public (Franklin is called as a witness in a court case, and is another time handcuffed as a hostile suspect by police) – but now, in that one ingenious zoom, the documentary crew invests in him too. This interlaced hallucination is so absorbing that it pulls others into its gravity and we watch them eschew the objective truth of this world and embrace the skewed irrationality of this deluded family, further endowing their imagination with substance.

Franklin was no longer an ill-proportioned Muppet copyright-infringement – he was suddenly a character with his own motivations and fears – one to be scrutinised with the ‘journalistic’ lens of the camera along with the other participants of this strange docu-drama. No longer were we watching GOB with a colourful sock on his hand; this was now GOB and Franklin, together again on another mismatched buddy caper, each with goals and motivations and a rich personal history.

Franklin – much as his self-titled album of duets suggests – comes alive.

Further, by laughing at the audacity and mania of this directorial decision, we, as the audience, seal the deal: this is Franklin. Mr. F. Worthy addition to the Bluth family bonanza, connectively given life by the collective comic unconscious, now left staring down the lens of the camera, shivering in fear lest he be discovered for the hysterically deluded fever-dream that he is.

And when a show has the capacity to breathe life into the wholly inanimate – to give sensation and autonomy to an ill-stitched glove with no anatomical scale – it has moved beyond simple farce and satire, and waded headlong into Dr. Frankenstein’s anarchic lair, so overabundant with imaginative fervour that it can defy such a simple inconvenience as ‘cancelation’, and reanimate the old in a blaze of the new.

So I very much hope to see Franklin back in the mix come the broadcast of season four. Hopefully, as I type these very words, his name is being etched on the filming call sheets. So come on, internet! Where are the real spoilers?! I already know that Liza Minnelli is confirmed to return, and Scott Baio is back; but have we heard anything from Franklin’s representatives? has his agent been approached? Pay him whatever he asks for producers! He’s worth every penny. And those tiny tracksuits aren’t cheap…

IMAGE: Arrested Development (Fox)

* In what has recently been confirmed to be a longer run of episodes than first announced. Glee…

** And while we’re at it: Henry Winkler merrily jumping over a shark? Priceless.

*** Indeed, beside the live-to air episodes of 30 Rock (which I intend to speak on sometime soon) there has probably never been a more elegantly self-reflexive moment of television than this episode, with more of a statement to make about its own purpose, and the mind-bending recursive descent that can occur when that window into the text’s production is explored.

There’s almost nothing more irritating than having someone describe to you why a television show is great. It’s so obnoxious, so presumptive. Television is an intensely personal thing – you don’t just swan in to a movie theatre for two hours and then swish back out into the daylight, ready to return to your life.* Television shows are something you live with week to week, sometimes for years. You get invested in them, the ups and downs of the narrative, the rise and dips in quality. They are relationships that an audience undertakes with a text. They can make you soar imaginatively and emotionally; and you can go through bad patches with a beloved television show, you can see them make mistakes, go in bad directions, but still hold on to the hopes that they can pull it all back together and be as great as they once were. You believe because you know them so well.

So having someone tell you why they love a particular show, and why therefore you should too can be incredibly invasive and off-putting. Worse than that, it can make actually getting around to watching the show itself feel like homework rather than escapist fun:

‘Urgh, that show is on… That show everyone has been insisting is so great, so important, so ‘clever’. But I don’t want to have to learn a whole bunch of new characters and situations all at once. I don’t want to have to scramble to catch up with all the episodes that have lead up to this one. And who are those people to know what I like?’

All good points; all completely understandable. Someone would have to be a ridiculous, self-righteous, pompous ass to still insist, after everything that you just thought/said, that they have any right to assign you viewing homework, to tell you what you should be doing with your free television time. What a jerk they would be.

…So here’s your homework. Go on. Go get a pen. I’ll wait.

And sit up straight.

Earlier this year, with its third season drawing to a close, the fate of the dearly beloved, but criminally under-viewed comedy Community hung precariously in the balance. NBC, the show’s broadcaster, had benched the sitcom halfway through the season, temporarily postponing screening the second half (almost always the first sign of an imminent axing) due to less than stellar ratings; behind the scenes a fractious relationship between Chevy Chase and creator/executive producer Dan Harmon had made for disquiet on set and had started spilling out into showbiz gossip; and finally, most alarmingly, there was the shock axing of Harmon, who had been the show’s primary guiding voice for the entirety of its production, in May.

At the 2012 San Diego Comic Con, the newly installed executive producers and show runners for the upcoming truncated season 4 (only 13 episodes, yet another bad sign for the show continuing), appeared with members of the cast to try and assuage the concerns of fans (who range from academically intrigued to fearfully traumatised) over the loss of Harmon and the potential shift in tone of the beloved show.

But why do people care? What does it matter? Isn’t it just another one of those quick-talking, postmodern shows where characters shoot cultural references at each other? Don’t we already have enough of those? Am I just asking a bunch of perfunctory rhetorical questions so that I can obnoxiously flip them on their head as this article goes on? Am I really that transparent?

Yes. Now shut up.

Yes, Community is clever. Yes, it’s alert and responsive to the cultural pulse. Yes, it is capable of the most ingenious and knowing genre parodies currently operating now that The Simpsons have slid into a decade long funk. But at the heart of all the seeming pop culture, self-aware hilarity, most importantly it’s about characters. Fractured human beings who need each other to survive, who better each other in order to grow.

A character like Abed speaks of Pretty In Pink, Back To The Future, and Cougar Town, not because he is ticking off some mass culture Bingo card, but because these texts are his window into a world he struggles to comprehend, and can help rationalise through film and television. Pierce ham-fistedly references facts from the ‘Wie-kie-poh-dia’ and ‘the facebooks’, because he’s a muddled baby-boomer struggling to act young. Jeff Winger looses himself in imported beauty products, faux-soccer fandom, and pretentious scotch drinking, because his narcissistic materialism clouds a fear of self-worth.

In the past I have tried to convince people to watch (to love) Community. I have had some successes, far too many failures, but the reaction that really surprises me is those who sort of shrug and say, ‘Yeah, it’s clever, but I wouldn’t need to watch it again.’

youwouldawha?

You wouldn’t need to drop in on this beautiful band of misfits again? You wouldn’t need to see how they’re going? Where they’re headed? How their magnificently fractured minds intersect? How they offer a salve for the damaged parts of each other? How, by accepting each other as they are, they become the best that they can, or have ever, been? You wouldn’t need, wouldn’t cry out to the universe in longing, for that?!

For me, Community is all about that imaginative act that allows for all manners of play.

I think a lot of people see the show sliding into the beats of genre and they think it’s an elongated piss-take with a rather too self-aware winking-at-the-audience-style satire of form over substance; but what those naysayers miss is that unlike the Family Guys and Scary Movies of the world, Community is not cynically tearing down these structures, poking holes in them. it is rather using them as playgrounds in which to best articulate their characters’ journeys, manifesting the experience of people who have themselves been born into and raised by such culturally dense tropes.

The onlyway that Community gets away with their genre swaps – a paintball game pastiche of every action film ever made; a Law and Order style investigation of a murdered yam; a stop-motion Christmas Special; a tale played out in the 8-bit graphics of a videogame – is because the characters (and thereby the audience) invest in the scenario with which they are presented. It’s a love note to imagination; to the unspoken collective accord of belief in one another that makes the notion of ‘community’ possible at all. The characters, like we the audience, like society at large, decide to believe in something together. And by believing in it, by feeding into that act of imagination, we make it real. We become a community.

Part of what is most extraordinary about the show is that up until now it has seemed to go out of its way to baffle its audience’s expectations. It offers us faith in the possibilities of storytelling, because it has repeatedly made effortless what any other fiction would attempt to do only to crash and burn. So many times over the course of its three year run we have heard of an upcoming premise (the return to the paintball game as a Western; the multiple dimensions story; the story set entirely in the Dreamatorium) and thought: Oh God, no. No, no one can do that… No matter how good they’ve been up until now they can’t pull that off…’

And yet… Every. Damned. Time.

It’s streets ahead.

In its first three miraculous seasons, Community has proved itself to be one of the most precious shows ever put to air. No doubt the show’s fans – amongst whom clearly I number myself – will be praying that it doesn’t get screwed up this coming season in the wake of all the ugly behind the scenes nonsense. Even his detractors would have to admit, Dan Harmon’s voice is going to be almost impossible to emulate, and personally, I’m not sure I hold much hope for the replacement show-runners. …however, Community has always flaunted my dire expectations, all the moments that I thought it couldn’t go on. So I hope to be joyfully disproved again in the months to come.

* With all the ‘swanning’ and ‘swishing’ I seem to be imagining audiences everywhere wearing capes now – sorry about that. But you do all look quite fetching. Just sayin’.